Who writes owners manuals?

[newbury]

If a company wants to have a good manual, at a minimum it will likely be written by a technical writer with some input information from all the various engineering groups (mostly to capture operating limits, technical specifications like fastener torques, and maintenance intervals), as well as have a user & maintainer validation process to make sure that the manual as written actually makes sense from a user & maintainer perspective. .....all of which isn't cheap to do.

In my career at the Army Topo lab one of my first big jobs was writing manuals for terrain analysis, and this was before computers.
At the time a terrain analyst REQUIRED a high school degree and a really high score on the intelligence test plus about 4 months of specialized training.
Yet our instructions from management were to write everything to an eighth grade level. And get it done yesterday in the size of a short pamphlet with pictures.
What management wanted was a complete parts manual, workshop manual and owners manual in 30 pages or less for analyzing all the factors of the battlefield environment. And don't make it complicated because the soldiers won't understand it.

 

[big bubba]

given the state of mainstream comprehension & literacy, i'd say writing for an audience of middle school level would by more appropriate than the 8th grade.